Songfacts®:

• "The Bleeding" was our introduction to Five Finger Death Punch, a band that quickly became one of the biggest names in metal. The song was their first single and a great indication of their sound: Highly emotional lyrics delivered with intensity (and sometimes a growl) by lead singer Ivan Moody, and a melodic metal guitar from their Hungarian founder, Zoltan Bathory. The song got some airplay on rock radio and went to #9 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. It helped their debut album, The Way Of The Fist, sell over 500,000 copies.
• When Ivan Moody auditioned to be the vocalist for Five Finger (they found him on MySpace!), the track for "The Bleeding" was one of the songs they asked him to work with. He came up with the lyric was was really shy, so he turned his back when he sang it.
  
  What he didn't know was that band founder Zoltan Bathory already knew he was the guy, and the plane ticket he bought to fly Moody from Denver to Los Angeles was one-way!
• The Bradley Scott-directed video was shot in Los Angeles on July 7–8, 2007. The clip features scream queen actress Danielle Harris, best known for her roles in the Halloween series. Also appearing is writer/director Sxv'leithan Essex, who also turned up in Five Finger Death Punch's video for "Never Enough," and directed the visual for "The Way of the Fist."
• The song is about Five Finger Death Punch vocalist Ivan Moody's ex-fianceé, and it also deals with his former band, Motograter. Moody said in a Blistering interview: "That song is a two-part song and it comes across as a relationship piece, which it is. Half of it is about my ex-fianceé who meant everything to me, so once Motograter had fell apart and then her and I dwindled apart it just took a huge part of my life. So a lot of that song was about me losing that love and then having to say that it was over and move on. The other half was written about Motograter, because that was the closest thing I've ever had to a real family and it took a huge part of my soul."
  
  One time, at a 5FDP show in Arizona, the girl who inspired the song showed up. Moody spoke about it, saying, "That was the first time I had seen her in about a year and I almost broke into tears because it all came rushing back to me. I'm not one of those artists that just likes to get up on stage and drink beer. When I sing a song I like to take myself and the fans back to the place where I was when I wrote that song."
• A few weeks before it showed up on the album The Way Of The Fist, the band released the song on an EP called Pre-Emptive Strike that also includes an acoustic version of the song. For a new band, having an acoustic arrangement of a song they're promoting comes in handy when they visit radio stations and do in-studio performances where amplification isn't practical. A few years earlier, Shinedown made the rounds with acoustic versions of "45" and "Simple Man."
• "The Bleeding" has been part of the Five Finger Death Punch live show since their start - it's their most-played song in concert.